Phonemic awareness and spelling: Children's judgments do not always agree with adults (original) (raw)
Related papers
An Analysis of the Spellings of Young Children with Varying Levels of Phonemic Awareness
1989
To examine the effects of phonemic awareness (drfined as "conscious access to the phonemic level of the speech stream and some ability to cognitively manipulate representations at this level") on spelling development and to explore the relationship of phonemic awareness to recognized stages of spelling development, a study collected data on 96 first-grade students and 87 third-grade students attending public school in 3outheast Texas. Children in both grades received traditional reading instruction from basal reading series reflecting a whole-word approach to initial reading instruction. All children in the study spelled the same set of 40 words. Phonemic awareness was measured using tne GKR Test of Phonemic Awar5ness, an oral test consisting of six subtests-phonemic segmentation, blending, deletion of first phoneme, deletion of last phoneme, substitution of first phcieme, and substitution of last phoneme. Word specific information was measured using a test containing 60 two-alternative, forced-choice items. One alternative was a correct spelling for the word. The other was a phonetically legitimate though incorrect spelling. Children were instructed to circle the correct spelling for each word as it was pronounced by the researcher. Findings suggested that in first-graders, phonemic awareness had a more powerful effect, indicating that spelling at this level is more of a sequential, encoding process. By third grade, word-specific informatlon exerted stronger influence on spelling, suggesting that children at this level spell using memorized associations. (MM)
1997
The present research was designed to investigate how children's early-acquired knowledge of letter names affects their spelling. Specifically, we asked whether kindergartners and first graders sometimes spell a sequence of phonemes such as /bi/ (the name of the letter b) or /zi/ (the name of the letter z) with the corresponding consonant letter rather than spelling the sequence alphabetically, with a consonant letter followed by a vowel letter. Children made a number of letter-name spelling errors, especially when the consonant and vowel formed a complete syllable. These results show that children's knowledge of letter names can cause them to deviate from the alphabetic principle-the principle that each phoneme should be represented with a single grapheme. The findings further suggest that syllables play a special role in early writing.
Phonemic awareness and letter knowledge in the child's acquisition of the alphabetic principle
Journal of Educational Psychology, 1989
Studied acquisition of the alphabetic principle in preliterate children, 3-5 yrs. The dependent variable throughout was a forced-choice between, e.g., "mow" and "sow" as pronunciations for the written word mow after the child had been taught to read the words mat and sat. Reliable performance on this transfer task was only achieved by children who (a) understood two aspects of phonological organization-phonemic segmentation of the speech items and the identity of their initial segments, and (b) had learned graphic symbols for the sounds u m" and "s." Most children who demonstrated alphabetic insight with symbols in word-initial position were also successful at transfer when the symbols were word-final. Thus, phonemic awareness and grapheme-phoneme knowledge were needed in combination for acquisition of the alphabetic principle, and, once gained, alphabetic insight proved relatively robust. Implications for reading acquisition are discussed.
Children's Phonological Awareness: Confusions between Phonemes that Differ Only in Voicing
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1998
Given the role of phonemic awareness in learning to read and spell, it is important to examine the linguistic factors that influence children's performance on phonemic awareness tasks. We found that, contrary to some previous claims, children did not perform better with fricative consonants (e.g., /z/) than with stops (e.g., /d/) in a phoneme recognition task. However, preschoolers and kindergartners were more likely to mistakenly judge that a syllable began with a target phoneme when the initial phoneme of the syllable differed from the target only in voicing (e.g., /t/ for the target /d/) than when it differed in place of articulation (e.g., /b/–/d/) or in both place and voicing (e.g., /p/–/d/). These results shed light on the organization of children's phonological systems. They also have implications for the design and interpretation of phonemic awareness tasks.
Knowledge of letter sounds in children from England
Applied Psycholinguistics, 2019
Learning the sounds of letters is important for learning to decode printed words and is a key component of phonics instruction. Some letter sounds are easier for children than others, and studies of these differences can shed light on the factors that influence children's learning. The present study examined knowledge of the sounds of lowercase letters among children in England, where a government-mandated curriculum specifies the order in which letter sounds should be taught and where letter sounds are taught before names. The participants were 355 children from Nursery (mean age 4 years, 4 months), Reception (mean age 5 years, 4 months), and Year 1 (6 years, 4 months). When order of teaching was statistically controlled, children did better than expected on the initial letter of their first name and worse on visually confusable letters. Unlike the North American children in previous studies, they did not perform better on letters that had their sounds at the beginning of their names. The sonority and age of acquisition of the letter's sound were also not influential. Implications for letter teaching, particularly for children at risk of literacy problems, are discussed.
Many previous studies of children's spelling have adopted a narrow approach, examining one linguistic structure at a time and paying little attention to differences among children or changes with development. We broadened the focus by examining two different, but potentially related, patterns (stressed syllabic /r/ and letter-name vowels) and by tracking changes in performance from fall to spring of first grade. The results show how children move from using one letter for each phonological unit (e.g., SR for sir; KON for cone) to appreciating the function of "extra" letters (e.g., the vowel letters i of sir and e of cone). Errors such as SRE for sir may arise during this process, reflecting an overgeneralization of the silent e pattern. The results are generally consistent with the view that spelling becomes more "orthographic" with development. However, the course of development is not always as predicted by existing stage theories.
Relations Between Children's Invented Spelling and the Development of Phonological Awareness
Educational Psychology, 2003
The objective of this study was to assess the impact on phonological skills of a training program that was intended to lead preschool children to move from prephonetic spellings to early phonemic spellings. The participants were 30 preschool children who were divided into two groups (experimental and control groups) that were equivalent in terms of the children's intelligence, the number of letters with which they were familiar and the nature of their invented spelling. The intervention proved effective, inasmuch as the children in the experimental group moved to early phonemic spellings, whereas those in the control group did not. This conceptual evolution entailed enhanced performance in phonemic classification, segmentation and deletion tests, in which the children in the experimental group displayed a degree of progress which differed significantly from that achieved by the members of the control group.
Phonemic-analysis training helps children benefit from spelling-sound rules
Memory & Cognition, 1983
It has been frequently suggested that the ability to analyze spoken words into phonemes facilitates children's learning of spelling-sound rules. This research attempts to demonstrate that link by showing that phonemic-analysis training helps children take advantage of spellingsound rules in learning to read. In two experiments, preschool and kindergarten prereaders participated in an analysis condition and a control condition on each of 4 test days. In the analysis condition, children learned to segment (and in Experiment 2, also to blend) selected spoken syllables. In the control condition, they merely repeated syllables. Children were then introduced to printed items that corresponded to the spoken syllables with which they had worked. The pronunciation of the "related" item could be deduced from those of other printed items in the set; the pronunciation of the "unrelated" item could not be so deduced. Both experiments revealed a significant interaction between condition (analysis vs. control) and item type (related vs. unrelated). In the control condition, children tended to make more errors on the related item than on the unrelated item; in the analysis condition, they tended to make fewer errors on the related item than on the unrelated item. These results suggest a causal link between the ability to analyze spoken syllables and the ability to benefit from spelling-sound relations in reading.
In Peter Jurgec, Liisa Duncan, Emily Elfner, Yoonjung Kang, Alexei Kochetov, Brittney K. O’Neill, Avery Ozburn, Keren Rice, Nathan Sanders, Jessamyn Schertz, Nate Shaftoe, and Lisa Sullivan (eds.), Proceedings of the 2021 Annual Meeting on Phonology. Washington, DC: Linguistic Society of America., 2022
This paper examines the written productions of first and second grade Catalan children in an attempt to tap into their understanding of the underlying forms of Catalan unstressed vowels for which alternations are not present (and for which multiple inputs are thus possible). The paper also explores the differences in spelling between alternating and non-alternating [ə] and [u], in order to find out whether morphophonemic alternations are taken into consideration in children’s spellings choices, as well at which stage these start to be considered. The results for first graders show generalized misspellings in which schwa and [u] are systematically associated with the graphemes a and u, regardless these vowels alternate with vowels in stressed position or do not. This behavior clearly supports the Lexicon Optimization Hypothesis, according to which there is a first stage in language acquisition in which, from all possible input candidates (Richness of the Base), the learner selects the one that matches the adult output representation as the optimal input (Smolensky 1996). The results for second graders show a noticeable decline in misspellings for alternating schwa and [u]. This leads to think that morphophonemic alternations are progressively incorporated and taken into account in the process of UR construction. Of course, this better performance in the spelling of alternating vowels might also be a consequence of a better familiarity with conventional spelling. Importantly, though, the decline in misspellings for alternating schwa and [u] coincides with an increase in spelling mistakes for non-alternating vowels. In our view, this undescores the influence of conventional orthography in children’s spelling choices, points to the influence of phonology, and more specifically to a stage of vacillation with respect to the UR of non-alternating forms, with apparent overgeneralizations. This behavior, thus, may support the free-ride approach to morphophonemic learning (McCarthy 2005). The results for both first graders and second graders show differences in the spelling between back vowels (with fewer mistakes) and non-back vowels (with more mistakes), and we argued this might be related to the fact that the children have to deal with a more reduced typology of output-input alternations for back vowels (two-to-one) than for non-back vowels (three-to-one). This is evidence, again, for the role of morphophonemic alternations (i.e. morphology) in children’s spelling choices. The results for both graders also reveal that more productive alternations, such as the ones found between a base and the diminutive, are more transparent to the kids than others: whereas diminutives were generally spelled correctly, non-diminutives were not, giving support again to the influence of morphophonemic alternations, and their transparency, in children’s spelling choices.